


If Thou'lt Be Silent I'll Be Glad

by Eisenschrott



Category: Star Wars: Rise of Empire Era - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Married Life, Non-Sexual Breastfeeding, War wounds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 10:21:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11987823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eisenschrott/pseuds/Eisenschrott
Summary: Little Zev Veers hardly lets his parents sleep at night. His father's sleep isn't so restful anyawy.





	If Thou'lt Be Silent I'll Be Glad

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the folk song _[Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament](http://www.contemplator.com/scotland/bothwell.html)_.

Max is standing in a nightmare. Debris of shelled-out houses crunch under the tank tracks. TIE fighters punctuate a pink-red sky. Bardottan civilians, laden with whatever personal belongings they could dig out of their devastated homes, are footslogging out of the village. The tank pilot mutters that these damn lizard-faces are too primitive to use hovercrates. A child cries somewhere.

Max frowns and looks around. He didn’t remember any children crying at that outpost; all the children had been sent off to refugee camps before his company got there.

It doesn’t even sound like a Bardottan youngling. It’s a Human wail, and it’s loud. Max’s heart speeds up, bone-chilling cold washes over him like he’s wearing much lighter clothes than his battle gear. “Where is the child?” he calls out. “Where is the child? Hey! Where is he?”

He jumps off the tank. A long, long jump in the dark. Only his fear and the child’s bawling remain.

With a gasp, he comes to his senses on a large bed. A bedsheet is balled up at his ankles, his body is stripped to pants and a thin cotton shirt, and Eliana is curled up next to him.

The screaming child is his son in the other room. Max has heard quieter alarm sirens.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Eliana half-grumbles, half-whines. “Zev, how can you be hungry again?”

Max doesn’t bother telling her to mind her language, even as a joke; if he did, she’d go fetch the filthy diapers trash can and fling it at him. “How do you know he’s hungry?” He raises his voice to be heard over Zev’s cries.

“I can tell by the… the _way_ he screams.” Eliana sighs against the pillow; it sounds an awful lot like a muffled sob. In the moonlight seeping from the window, all Max can see of her is the paleness of her skin—she went to bed in just her panties—and the wavy contour of her hair.

Max places a hand on her shoulder. “Stay here and sleep. I’ll take care of it.”

“You sure?”

“Ready-made baby milk in the kitchen. Pre-heat for thirty seconds.”

“Okay, soldier, you take that hill.”

Max doesn’t find the joke funny, but laughs softly to make her happy. He scrambles to his feet and lurches towards the door, Zev’s cries making his ears ring. He lets out a cry of his own when his forehead smashes against the wall. “Fuck!”

Light floods the bedroom. Eliana is now sit up on the bed, murder in her dark-circled eyes. Max cannot help but gaze at her swollen breasts, for all she claims that Zev is eating her alive.

“I’m sorry,” says Max.

“Sorry my arse! You have spent too much time away from home.”

Stars, he cannot deal with an angry wife and a shouty baby at the same time. “What are you talking about now?”

“You don’t even remember where the door of your bedroom is.”

Max opens his mouth to deny, but his mind calculates distances and placements; if this bedroom had been his quarters on a Star Destroyer, he wouldn’t have missed the doorframe. He shuts his trap. His forehead is achy and hot; shame spreads the warmth over his face.

“Go to the bathroom and dress that bump.” Eliana trudges to the door. “You’re bleeding, in case you didn’t notice.”

“But Zev…?”

“Band aids are in the second drawer under the sink.” She walks past him and into the corridor. A moment later, Max hears her in Zev’s room, cooing in baby-talk.

Zev’s cries lower to a blubber, then isolated sobs, pipe down at last. The flat goes as silent as an evacuated village.

Blood trickling down to his eyes spurs Max to the bathroom. He slants a look at the baby’s bedroom on the way. In the low azure light of the bed lamp, he catches a glimpse of Eliana sitting by the crib and of Zev in her arms, mashed to her left breast.

The bathroom mirror tosses Max’s bloodied face back at him. While he wipes the bump and tapes a band aid over it, he thinks of that Army supply master he met back on the war-torn Bardottan colony world. Alderaanian girl, same age as him, her face blown off by a slug shot. The civilian farmer who’d fired the shot didn’t understand Basic, except for the one word that got him jumpy: _requisition_. Max overheard the field medic say the supply master stayed alive for some time after being shot, and Max imagines it must have been painful as fuck.

He’s not very afraid of physical pain when he’s in a war zone; it’s just one of the many bad things that happen. Here at home, instead, picturing himself with a gory raw mess in place of his healthy (if a bit baggy-eyed) face gets him queasy and shaky.

He splashes cold water on his cheeks and walks out of the bathroom, focusing on the feel of wooden tiles under his bare feet to stay grounded in reality. It is a safe reality. His wife and child are a few steps away.

“Eli?”

She blinks and looks up at him as he peers from the doorway.

“Isn’t it more comfortable on the couch? I can make you some tea.”

“No, thanks.” She stands up, slowly as not to move the baby, and plods to the living room with Max behind her. She knows each square centimetre of her home, even without lights on. Max follows her every step, docile and abashed. Does he have any right to call this place _his_ home, too?

They sit on the couch next to each other. Eliana rests her head on Max’s chest. Her smell has become sharper since Zev’s birth; sweat mixes with milk. Max isn’t sure if the stir it creates in his belly is a stab of revulsion or of arousal.

“Can I caress him?” he asks in a hush.

“Hm-hm.” Stars, she’s so sleepy.

He drapes his right arm over her shoulders and strokes Zev’s head with his left hand. The hair is so soft and the skin so smooth it scares him. A well-aimed knock with the butt of a blaster, and that tiny frail head would be crushed. Tears well up in Max’s eyes.

After an eternity that the holoclock on the wall claims amount to ten standard minutes, Eliana shifts Zev away from Max’s hand. The tears in his eyes have dried up and his vision has adjusted to the dark; he can see that Eliana has moved the baby to the other breast. Zev doesn’t seem to latch on the nipple. He leans back his head on Eliana’s palm and burps.

“Thank the Goddesses he’s full.” Eliana whispers a few words in Hrönir, a goodnight blessing whose correct pronunciation she’s tried and failed several times to teach Max. “I’ll take him back to bed in a moment.” She curls up on the couch, her head slides lower until it rests on Max’s lap. Zev is nestled against Eliana’s chest, her arm holds his whole little body in place from behind.

“Sorry I got bitchy,” she drawls.

“You had a point.” Max strokes her hair, a greasy unkempt tangle that begs for a wash and a comb. He keeps stroking, his fingertips brushes her ear, her cheek, back and forth, light and gentle.

“Do you miss being at work?”

Max swallows before venturing an answer. “Well, sometimes it’s hard to sleep on the front lines, too.”

Somehow, Eliana’s silence conveys upset. _Calm down, soldier,_ Max admonishes himself _. You’re just projecting your own hurt. Imagining banthashit_.

He flinches when Eliana speaks again, “You can leave whenever you want. Earlier, if you want. It’s fine. You can go somewhere more restful, at your parents’, I don’t know. Just don’t worry about me. I’ll manage.” Her tone is drunk with sleep, no perceptible anger.

“No,” he says. Crying cracks through that single syllable. The bandaged scratch on his forehead burns like a redjacket wasp sting.

Eliana nuzzles her face to his crotch. She kisses him through his pants. “Let’s make love tomorrow,” she purrs.

“Okay.” That had been the plan for today. Then Zev has claimed their whole attention all the time, and in the end they were too tired. “Now sleep, dear.”

“Hmm…” Her breathing sends a thrum down his sex. The hairs on his thighs stand, a nascent erection starts tugging. It’s bearable, though.

He relaxes on the couch, contemplating the ceiling. A wakeful night lies ahead of him, the Denoni night that’s a couple standard hours longer than a night cycle on a starship. He doesn’t want to go back—not yet—to the ravaged village and the civilians who don’t speak Basic. Zev’s soft, barely audible breathing and Eliana’s unladylike snoring will keep him here, grounded to a dark home he silently vows to burn into his memory before he must leave it again.


End file.
